It’s the birthday of Ellen Raskin (1928-1984, #diedtooyoung), author of The Westing Game (1978), a middle grade murder mystery novel that won the 1979 Newbery Medal and the undying devotion of a bazillion readers, including Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn, who rereads the novel once a year. The novel begins, “The sun sets in the [...]
It’s the birthday of Virginia Hamilton (1936-2002), whose more than 40 works of “liberation literature” spanned everything from science fiction to folk stories to biography and who was the first black author to win a Newbery Award (1975) and the first children’s author to win a MacArthur “genius” grant (1995). Hamilton was born in Yellow [...]
It’s the birthday of British author Douglas Adams (1952-2001, #diedtooyoung), who wrote the satirical science fiction series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and revealed that the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything is 42, and that the most important thing to bring along while hiking the galaxy is a [...]
It’s the birthday of Jeffrey Eugenides (b. 1960), who has written just three novels to date but who became a household name when his second novel, Middlesex (2002), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was chosen by Oprah for her book club in 2007. Eugenides was born in Detroit, Michigan, the youngest of three [...]
It’s the birthday of Bret Easton Ellis (b. 1964), best known as the author of American Psycho (1991) and sometimes called “the brattiest of the Brat Pack,” a group of writers that also includes Jay McInerney, Tama Janowitz, and Jill Eisenstadt. Ellis was born in L.A. and grew up in Sherman Oaks. He attended Bennington [...]
It’s the birthday of poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), whose greatest poems include Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and Aurora Leigh (1857) and who taught the world that you’re never too old to run away from home. Browning was born at Coxhoe Hall, Durham, England and raised in rural Worcestershire and was the oldest of [...]
It’s the birthday of poet, novelist, and essayist Leslie Marmon Silko (b. 1948), one of the most important writers of the Native American literary renaissance of the last century and the only person I’ve ever heard of to have a pet rattlesnake. So there's that. Silko, who is Laguna Pueblo, Mexican, and white, grew up [...]
It’s the birthday of Swiss author and folklorist Johann Rudolf Wyss (1782-1830), best known for completing and editing his father’s book, Der schweizerische Robinson (Swiss Family Robinson, 1812-1827), which became one of the most popular novels in history. Wyss was born in Bern, Switzerland, where his father, Johann David Wyss, was a clergyman at the [...]
It’s the birthday of poet Richard Wilbur (1921-2017, #nicelonglife), who throughout his illustrious career was praised for his technical virtuosity and courtly style but was also at times criticized for his technical virtuosity and courtly style. So if you liked Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell, you maybe didn’t like Richard Wilbur. Wilbur was born in [...]